Nevermind!  After tracing through with pdb, it looks like the settings.py file under /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cobbler/web/settings.py was the one that needed to be edited.  I’m up and running now.

From: Kyle Flavin
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2015 11:20 AM
To: cobbler-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org
Subject: Struggling to get cobbler_web working from the github source

I’m trying to get a cobbler development environment setup on CentOS, using the following document:

https://github.com/cobbler/cobbler/blob/master/docs/developer-guide.rst

I’ve cloned down the repository from github: https://github.com/cobbler/cobbler

I’ve installed the necessary packages noted in the document above, and do a “make install”.  This gets cobblerd up and running.

But, I also want to get cobbler_web going as well, and it appears to be only partially configured from these steps.  I can see the WSGI file has been put down, and Apache has been configured, but it doesn’t look like any of the Django-specific files have been installed under /usr/share/cobbler/web.  When I attempt to access http://127.0.0.1/cobbler_web, I get an error in the Apache logs saying “The SECRET_KEY settings must not be empty”.  I tried installing Django manually (pip install Django), and copying the settings.py file under /usr/share/cobbler/web, but that didn’t get rid of the error.  I also tried setting the SECRET KEY in the global Django settings file under /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Django/conf/.  No joy.

I notice when trying to install from the github source, my /usr/share/cobbler/web directory only has the following files:

cobbler.wsgi templates/

But when installing from my distro’s RPMs, I see the following:

cobbler_web  cobbler.wsgi  __init__.py  manage.py  settings.py  urls.py

I do see these files in the github repo, but it doesn’t look like they’re put into the correct place by the setup.  I feel like I’m missing some step that configures the rest of cobbler_web.  Is anyone familiar with the situation I’m in?